Search for MeV Gamma-ray emission from TeV bright red dwarfs with COMPTEL

Abstract

The SHALON atmospheric Cherenkov telescope has detected very high energy gamma-ray emission at TeV energies from eight red dwarfs, namely, V388 Cas, V547 Cas, V780 Tau, V962 Tau, V1589 Cyg, GJ 1078, GJ 3684 and GL 851.1. Consequently, these red dwarfs have been suggested as sources of ultra-high energy cosmic rays. In this work, we search for soft gamma-ray emission from these TeV bright red dwarfs between 0.75-30 MeV using archival data from the COMPTEL gamma-ray imaging telescope, as a follow-up to a similar search for GeV gamma-ray emission using the Fermi-LAT telescope. Although, prima-facie, we detect non-zero photon flux from three red dwarfs with high significance, these signals can attributed to contamination from nearby sources such as Crab and Cygnus, which are within the angular resolution of COMPTEL, and have been previously detected as very bright point sources at MeV energies. Therefore, we could not detect any statistically significant signal ($>3\sigma$) from any of these eight red dwarfs from 0.75-30 MeV. We then report the 95% confidence level upper limits on the differential photon flux (at 30 MeV), integral photon flux and integral energy flux for all of the eight red dwarfs. The integral energy flux limits range between $10^{-11}-10^{-10}ergs/c{\mathrm{m}}^2/s$.

10 pages, 12 figures. Accepted for publication in JCAP

References in corpus (14)

• Extreme solar events
• GammaLib and ctools: A software framework for the analysis of astronomical gamma-ray data
• PANGU: A High Resolution Gamma-ray Space Telescope
• Massive Argon Space Telescope (MAST): a concept of heavy time projection chamber for gamma-ray astronomy in the 100 MeV --- 1 TeV energy range
• A prompt radio transient associated with a gamma-ray superflare from the young M dwarf binary DG CVn
• COSI: From Calibrations and Observations to All-sky Images
• On the expected $\gamma$-ray emission from nearby flaring stars
• Search for spatial coincidence between IceCube neutrinos and radio pulsars
• Search for GeV Gamma-Ray Emission from SPT-SZ selected Galaxy Clusters with 15 years of Fermi-LAT data
• The GAMMA-400 space observatory: status and perspectives
• Fermi/LAT detection of a transient gamma-ray flare in the vicinity of the binary star DG CVn
• COMPTEL data analysis using GammaLib and ctools
• A stacked search for spatial coincidences between IceCube neutrinos and radio pulsars
• A pilot search for MeV gamma-ray emission from five galaxy clusters using archival COMPTEL data

Cited by in corpus (1)

• Search for spatial coincidence between IceCube neutrinos and gamma-ray bright red dwarfs